If this research is correct, large windfarms could be losing a huge part of their potential output due to inadequate spacing, as Phys.org reports. Quote: “We found these dramatic effects at turbine spacings commonly used in present-day wind farms on land.”

Wind energy has been remarkably successful in providing an increasing share of cheap renewable energy. But can this trend continue to supply more and more renewable energy for decades to come?

A new study published by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, lowers the expectations of wind energy when used at large scales.

Many parts of the State remained without power for days and thousands of businesses together suffered multi-$million losses. The biggest of those losses were suffered by Nyrstar’s lead and zinc smelter at Port Pirie, BHP Billiton’s gold, copper and uranium mine at Olympic Dam, Oz Mineral’s Prominent Hill copper and goldmine and Arrium’s steel works at Whyalla: collectively, the losses suffered by SA’s miners and mineral processors are in the tens of $millions.

With litigators breathing down their necks, nervous wind power outfits are running confused and desperate interference over the (now, well-known) cause.

David Crowe in The Australian reports on the row about renewable energy policies in the wake of the storm that crashed South Australia’s entire state power grid. Phrases like ‘reality check’ and ‘sow the wind, reap the whirlwind’ spring to mind.
H/T GWPF

The Australian government will confront the states over the ­danger of statewide blackouts at an urgent meeting tomorrow to respond to the outage across South Australia last week, amid a furious political fight over ­whether wind farms helped cause the failure.

The states are being warned that their growing use of renewable energy will make their power networks more vulnerable to outages, leaving Australians at risk of blackouts from any repeat of last week’s ferocious storm.

America has some perfect examples of what not to do, if it wants to remain an industrial and manufacturing power-house, with a standard of living that much of the World can only envy.

South Australia has set the pace with spot prices that rocket in minutes from $70 per MWh to $2,000 to $4,000 and all the way to the regulated market price cap of $14,000 per MWh, every time wind power output collapses on a total and totally unpredictable basis.

And much of Europe is in the same boat: think Spain, Germany, Denmark and the UK.

From what’s coming out of the USA, Americans don’t seem that keen to follow the path set by countries facing social and economic disaster, thanks to their ludicrous attempts to run on sunshine and breezes.

This plot shows the QBO during the 1980s. [credit: Wikipedia / FU Berlin]

Another climate mystery – this time the QBO – for scientists to get their teeth into, as the Mail Online reports.

For more than 60 years, atmospheric scientists have observed the consistent behaviour of a wind pattern known as the ‘quasi-biennial oscillation’ – a phenomenon that repeats every 28 months. But in late 2015, the long-reliable pattern suddenly changed.

The winds have since returned to their normal course, and while no immediate effects were detected, astronomers are working to understand if this was just a one-time ‘black swan’ event, or a ‘canary in the coal mine’ signalling unseen conditions.

If Oregon is modelling its electricity supply policy on South Australia, it should know what to expect, as Hot Air reports.

If you live in Oregon and rely on certain fancy, high tech features of the industrial revolution such as having lights in your home and refrigerated food, you might want to start stocking up on candles and non-perishable goods.

The green energy warriors have pretty much taken over the state legislature in the Beaver State for more than the past decade and they’ve managed to pass all sorts of interesting laws. One of them was a rule which says that all coal fired power will be eliminated by 2020… a deadline which is pretty much right around the corner.

It’s finally happening. Thanks to Herculean efforts by Niklas Morner, we are presenting a two-day conference in central London on the 8-9th September. Speakers are coming from all over the world to present their work, and it is not to be missed!

Take the 8-9th September off work and join us for this historic event. The first UK climate conference in decades which will counter the scaremongering of the IPCC with a cool, rational approach to the study of climate change, presenting alternative explanations, new data, theory and commentary. Topics include solar-planetary theory, causes of ENSO, sea ice extent, sea level, ozone depletion, volcanos, regional forecasting, journal gatekeeping and many more.

The list of contributors is long, we are packing a huge number of presentations into this two day event. Speakers include Niklas Morner, myself, Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller, Nicola Scafetta, Per Strandberg, Jan-Erik Solheim, and thats before lunch on day one! Piers Corbyn will be there! So will Christopher Monckton! See the full programme and the extended abstracts in this 35 Megabyte document for full details. There are also some travel and booking details on the geoethic.com website. An updated version is available on reseachgate

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“I think it’s fair to say there is a growing awareness of the need for stable back-up.”
– Spark Infrastructure’s new chairman, Doug McTaggart

Well, yes. But you could have read that on amateur blogs at any time in the last few years. Somehow it takes leaders with supposedly smart advisers an age to see the obvious, especially when they don’t want to see it.

Arrium Steel’s Gerard Mahoney: SA’s power play the last roll of the dice.

***

South Australia’s unfolding energy calamity, has drawn all sorts of self-professed experts out of the woodwork; desk-bound boffins, who all seem to have ready-made answers to SA’s self-inflicted power supply and pricing disaster.

However, most of their “solutions” involve spending hundreds of $millions more of other people’s money. We’ll hand over to The Australian, as another power market dilettante, Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute (a Labor-left think tank) struts his stuff.

Energy crises in South Australia and Tasmania have shown that unilateral state-based renewable energy measures were distorting the national market and could trigger damaging price surges in eastern states, one of Australia’s leading energy specialists has warned.

Bats are engaged in some kind of Russian roulette with wind farms, reports ScienceDaily. Operators are not keen on making the required regulatory checks for their presence. A possible tech solution to the problem exists.

Wind turbines attract bats. They seem to appear particularly appealing to female noctule bats in early summer. In a pilot study, researchers of the German Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin noticed this when they tracked the flight paths of noctule bats, Nyctalus noctula, using the latest GPS tracking devices.

Even if the turbines themselves are in working order, unreliable intermittent wind power remote from the areas of densest population can cause havoc to China’s power grid system, as Andrew Follett reports in the Daily Caller.

The government stopped approving new wind power projects in the country’s windiest regions in early March, according to China’s National Energy Administration statement. These regions previously installed nearly 71 gigawatts of wind turbines, more than the rest of China combined.

Wind is an occasional ally in all sorts of recreational pursuits: sailing, kite surfing, puffing on a ready-to-burst dandelion and watching their parasol seeds drift skywards, and the childish delight of sending kites aloft. But it’s taken a special breed of Muppet to turn a source of sporadic fun into a ridiculously expensive, sometime source of electricity.

In our recent post on the comparative debacles of South Australia and the UK we picked up on the line dropped by Britain’s head wind spinner, Hugh McNeal (RenewableUK) who – now that the subsidy trough has been emptied – says there is no chance of any more of these things blighting Blighty as: ‘The wind speeds don’t allow for it.’

After that (stating the bleeding obvious) admission, the few among Britain’s journos that get it had a field day.

After years of being fed a myth about the wind ‘powering’ Britain for…

Booker follows up my story about last week’s interview with Renewable UK’s Chief Exec, Hugh McNeal, which claimed that onshore wind is now the cheapest form of generation:

The interview in last week’s Sunday Telegraph with Hugh McNeal, the new head of RenewableUK, was remarkable in more ways than one. Certainly readers may have been surprised to know how easily he could switch from being a senior official at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to running our leading lobby group for wind farms. But even more significant was the way he unwittingly exposed what appears to me to be a massive deceit now at the heart of our national energy policy.

Like DECC, he has bought into the trick of pretending that renewables are now “the cheapest form of new [electricity] generation in Britain”. On the face of it this claim seems…

Two Months ago, solar system dynamics researcher R.J. Salvador gave us an update on the performance of his length of day (LOD) model. Based on our planetary theory, the model has performed well so far, showing aberrations from the real world data within two standard deviations on a couple of occasions, but mainly tracking the model projection very closely indeed. Here’s the latest plot.

Rick says:

The model is within range. Even in the correlation period there are these wobbles where the actual deviates from the model by 2 std dev. We may have to wait until the seasons change again to know if the deviation widens or closes. I will update it again in two months.

I wish all the best for Tim.

Good luck with your BREXIT campaign.

It’s going to be fascinating watching further updates as they arrive for signs of planetary periodicity in the aberrations and/or trying to correlate them with major weather patterns which could be responsible.

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James Marusek’s paper says: I propose two mechanisms primarily responsible for Little Ice Age climatic conditions. These two components are Cloud Theory and Wind Theory.
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Thanks to Paul Homewood for bringing this to our attention.

[Click on ‘view original post’ below to find a link to the full paper].

The sun is undergoing a state change. It is possible that we may be at the cusp of the next Little Ice Age. For several centuries the relationship between periods of quiet sun and a prolonged brutal cold climate on Earth (referred to as Little Ice Ages) have been recognized. But the exact mechanisms behind this relationship have remained a mystery. We exist in an age of scientific enlightenment, equipped with modern tools to measure subtle changes with great precision. Therefore it is important to try and come to grips with these natural climatic drivers and mold the evolution of theories that describe the mechanisms behind Little Ice Ages.

The sun changes over time. There are decadal periods when the sun is very active magnetically, producing many sunspots. These periods are referred…

The project is certainly on the ropes but a knockout punch may not yet have been applied, as the report explains.
H/T Daily Telegraph

A £2 billion offshore wind farm is set to be scrapped after it lost a Government subsidy contract due to an ongoing legal challenge over its impact on birds.

The proposed Neart na Gaoithe wind farm would see 64 turbines built nine miles off the coast of Fife and was one of only two offshore wind projects to win a subsidy contract from the Government last year.

When the wind industry and its worshippers start chanting their mantras about the ‘wonders’ of wind, it isn’t long before they start preaching about the examples purportedly set by the Europeans; and, in particular, the Nordic nations.

That the great wind power fraud was driven by Denmark’s struggling turbine maker, Vestas probably has a fair bit to do with the worshippers’ fanatic-cult-like veneration of Scandinavia.

When you’re trying to sell a ‘product’ with NO commercial value, the ‘business’ – for want of a better word – can only be about what you can extract from gullible/compliant governments (and unwitting power consumers), in the form of massive and endless subsidies.

If it gets approved, this looks a lot like an onshore ban in practice if not in name.
H/T PEI

A new bill submitted to Poland’s parliament threatens the very survival of the wind energy industry in the country.

The bill will make it illegal to build wind turbines within 2km of other buildings or forests — a measure campaigners said would rule out 99 per cent of land — and quadruple the rate of tax payable on existing turbines — making most unprofitable.

The Germans went into wind power harder and faster than anyone else – and the cost of doing so is catching up with a vengeance.

The subsidies have been colossal and the impacts on the electricity market chaotic.

Some 800,000 German homes have been disconnected from the grid – victims of what is euphemistically called “fuel poverty”. Power starved Germans, instead of freezing, grabbed their axes and tramped into their forests to improve their sense of energy security – although foresters apparently take the view that this self-help measure is nothing more than blatant timber theft (see our post here).

German manufacturers – and other energy intensive industries – faced with escalating power bills are packing up and heading to the USA – where power prices are 1/3 of Germany’s (see our posts here and hereand here). And the “green” dream of creating thousands of jobs in the wind industry has turned out to be just that: a dream (see our post here).